Slashdot linked today to an article talking about Russia’s Minister of Communications' plan to put Linux-based “Russian OS” in all schools in Russia by 2009. The Russian government had not shown much love for Linux in the past and the article was rather incoherent and not particularly convincing, so I went to look in on the Russian internet to figure out what was going on.

First, to lay to rest Slashdotters' fears about Russian government’s lack of imagination when it comes to names, “Russian OS” seems to be just a case of mistranslation, perhaps due to Russians' persistent difficulties with English articles. The project is “a Russian OS,” and no name has been proposed for it. Apart from that, it seems the indeed the minister is talking about putting “a Russian OS” in schools. And yes, what they really seem to mean by that is a Russian Linux distribution. They want to hire a Russian company to do that and pay them 750 million roubles (US$25mil). This all makes sense, since Russia kind of agreed to crack down on pirating Windows and where are they going to get the money to for licenses for all the Russian schools (of which the majority now run pirated Windows, or so people say). What’s strange about this is of course the talk of this being “a Russian OS” or “an operating system developed in Russia”. I am not particularly averse to government support for Russian software (though getting out of its way would be perhaps a better first start) or to them making a bit deal about software developed in Russia. I am also all for Linux in Russian schools. But let’s not confuse the two, please. Fixing a few localization bugs in Linux (and how much of an “operating system” can one build for $25,000,000?) and putting it in Russian schools is fine. Calling that “software developed in Russia”, however would be strange to say the least.

After some surfing, however, I started figuring out where this came from. Apart from Leonid Reiman, the Minister of Communication, and Dmitri Medvedev, a vice prime minister, another name kept coming up often in connection to this news: Viktor Alksnis, an nationalist MP who apparently has been a pushing for open source since May this year. (Before that he was apparently too busy fighting with Russian anti-fascists in complaining about hacker’s breaking his LiveJournal.) Now, let’s say that if I could pick a Russian politician to be a friend of Linux, Viktor Alksnis would be pretty much at the bottom of my list. Think of the sequence of slogans: “For a Russia free from homosexuality! For the Russian way of life!” and then suddenly “For a Linux-based Russian OS!” Strange, right? It’s a bit like Pat Buchanan suddenly becoming a major Linux supporter in the US… But it’s an interesting story, so let’s get started.

Like some other Russian politicians, Alksnis has a LiveJournal. And unlike some US politician’s “blogs” that are obviously written by their PR department, reading his blog gives one an impression that: (a) he writes it himself, (b) he writes whatever the hell comes to his mind, in terms bordering on crude, © he reads his readers comments. This part © is important. On May 11 Alksnis posted a call for building a Russian OS. It mentions that the operating system “should have open architecture”, should be “compatible with Windows”, and that the license should belong to the Russian government. Apart from the term “open architecture” there is little in the call to suggest that Alksnis had heard about open source. It is really is above all a call for Russia to build its own operating system and stick it to the imperialists. Not surprisingly, his readers pointed out that building a brand new OS from scratch is not a very good use of government money and nearly unanimously suggested that making a Russian distro of Linux for Russian schools would be a much better idea. So, two weeks later he announced on the his LJ a new version of the proposal, this time specifically talking about a Linux distro. Mind you, it still asks the government to start a new “national project entitled "Fatherland Operating System.” (Ok, to be fair the Russian word “otechestvennaya” can mean different things, from “fatherland” to simply “domestic”.) The proposal still suggests that use of “foreign software” should be limited only to cases where there are no domestic alternatives. Obviously the reaction from the readers was a lot more positive, and further corrections were suggested a lot more politely. E.g., someone suggested correcting the clause about restrictions on the “use of foreign software” to “use of closed source foreign sources”. Another two weeks he posted another revision of the proposal, this time calling for a national project entitled “Russia’s Information Independence” (a bit more reasonable, if you ask me), and mentioning things like ODF.

In June Alksnis shares with his readers his excitement about ReactOS – a “Windows-compatible” free OS developed in Russia. His readers find it amusing. A week later Alksnis is reading about Debian. In early August is calling his readers to help translate GPL v. 3 to Russian. Finally on Sept 12 there is an announcement of things moving and the Ministry of Information and Communications planning on doing something. The post has extensive quotes from some MIC document that seem to show that whoever wrote it actually understands the issue. Interesting.

To be continued, probably.